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  “Dunroamin Holiday” Copyright © 2015 by Grace Burrowes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations or excerpts for the purpose of critical reviews or articles—without permission in writing from Grace Burrowes, author and publisher of the work.

  “The Laird and I” © Copyright 2015 by Patience Griffin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations or excerpts for the purpose of critical reviews or articles—without permission in writing from Patience Griffin, author and publisher of the work.

  Published in the two-novella compilation, Must Love Highlanders, by Grace Burrowes Publishing, 21 Summit Avenue, Hagerstown, MD 21740.

  ISBN for Must Love Highlanders:978-1-941419-11-3

  Cover by Wax Creative, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Dunroamin Holiday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  The Laird and I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Dunroamin Holiday

  * * *

  By Grace Burrowes

  Dedicated to my late brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas Edwards Polk, II, PhD. Tom gave me the first sincere compliment I can recall receiving, and since that day (I was about eleven), I’ve stood a little taller and been a little more confident.

  Chapter One

  * * *

  “Scottish men are hot, fun, and emotionally unavailable,” the travel agent chirped. “Exactly what a girl needs for the perfect vacation.”

  Louise Cameron hadn’t been a girl for years, while the woman madly typing on the other side of the desk—Hi, I’m Cindy!—looked like she’d yet to graduate high school.

  “I need peace and quiet,” Louise said, “which is why I’ll spend my time in a cottage in the Scottish countryside, more or less by myself.”

  The agent, a perky exponent of the more-highlights-are-better school of cosmetology, swiveled away from her keyboard as a printer purred out an itinerary.

  “The Scottish countryside is full of men, braw, bonnie laddies who can hold their whisky, so to speak. Hit the nearest pub and wear dancing shoes. You know the tickets are nonrefundable?”

  The question gave Louise a pang. “The charges have already hit my credit card.” Jane had insisted as only Jane could, and in a weak moment of rebound impulsivity, Louise had capitulated.

  Nonrefundable tickets were cheaper, and a woman who’d abandoned the lucrative practice of law needed to watch her piggy bank—or return to the practice of law.

  “Then you’re all set!” Hi-I’m-Cindy! snatched the itinerary from the printer, tucked it into an envelope, and slid the packet across the desk. “Let me know if you have a good time, though I’m sure you will. Scotland is one of the fastest-growing travel destinations on the planet and for good reason. We’ve had nothing but rave reviews for Dunroamin Cottage, and the scenery is unbelievable, if you know what I mean.”

  Before Louise could be subjected to a lascivious wink, she stuffed the itinerary and tickets into her purse and rose.

  “Thanks, Cindy. I’ll tell the braw, kilted laddies you said hello. I’m off to lunch.” With the author of Louise’s latest misfortune.

  Jane had already chosen a table when Louise arrived at their favorite Eritrean restaurant—also the only Eritrean restaurant in Damson Valley.

  “Greetings, earthling!” Jane said, bouncing to her feet and kissing Louise’s cheek. “If you bailed on your Scottish vacation, I will sue the travel agent.”

  Jane looked better than ever, her red hair longer than Louise recalled seeing it, her petite figure every bit as perfect. Jane’s recent marriage to, and law practice merger with, Dunstan Cromarty was probably responsible for the damned twinkle in her eyes.

  “I didn’t bail,” Louise said. She hadn’t bailed yet. “What are you working on?”

  Lawyer-fashion, Jane had papers spread out on the table. As Louise slid into the booth, Jane gathered up the documents and tucked them into a plain manila folder.

  “Big bad divorce proceeding,” Jane muttered.

  “The best kind.” From a billable hours perspective. “Anybody I know?”

  Louise flipped open a menu rather than glance at the name on the folder, though as often as she and Jane had eaten here, Louise could have recited the entrees from the depths of a Chunky Monkey coma.

  Jane stashed the paperwork in a shoulder bag that had been known to double as a gym bag, emergency first aid bag, overnight bag, and gourmet goodie bag.

  “Nothing’s been filed yet,” Jane said.

  Meaning Louise, because she didn’t actively practice with Jane any more, wasn’t privy to the details.

  “I’m still legally a partner in the firm,” Louise said. “Besides, I’m off to Scotland for the next several weeks, and won’t have anybody to gossip with.”

  People underestimated Jane because she was diminutive and pretty. As an attorney, she was also hell in stilettos when she chose to be. That she’d teamed up in every way with Dunstan Cromarty made sense: The big Scot was up to Jane’s weight, so to speak.

  “Julie Leonard is ditching the handsome buffoon she married in a fit of madness right out of law school,” Jane said, squeezing lemon into her water.

  “Julie has always been a pleasure to work with.” To the extent that a prosecutor could be a pleasure to work with when she was trying to put your client behind bars. “Maybe Madam State’s Attorney needs a Scottish vacation, too.”

  Or a Scottish honeymoon. Jane had truly never looked better, for which Louise ought to hate the entire country. Louise pretended to study the menu instead, though her appetite hadn’t been spotted since about Christmas.

  “Have you heard from Robert?” Jane asked.

  Let the cross-examination begin. “Yes, I have. He’s engaged.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jane’s compassion was immediate and sincere, also irritating as hell.

  “It’s my past all over again,” Louise said, putting the menu aside. “I fall for an art professor and he screws me over. The last one stole my glazing process, and this one leaves me with three months on the lease, and for a sophomore whose understanding of art depends on having a mouse in her hand—of one species or another.”

  “A wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie, that mouse,” Jane smirked. “You’re better off without him.”

  Brilliant legal deduction. “Let’s order, shall we?”

  They had their usual—sambusas, soup, and plenty of warm, vinegary injera bread. Louise ate to avoid a scolding, not because the food appealed.

  “Lou, are you okay?”

  Well, hell. “I will be. The soup is good, don’t you think?”

  “Louise Mavis Cameron, I am your friend, so stop being polite. If you don’t want to teach drawing anymore, then don’t. If you don’t want to practice law ever again, that’s okay, too. A big, wide world will surely offer something you enjoy doing that pays the bills. While you try to figure out what that is, go to Scotland. Dunstan says Wallace will enjoy having some feline company while you’re gone.”

  Louise dipped her spoon in the soup of the day and said nothing
. How pathetic was it, that her sole excuse for canceling a very expensive trip abroad came down to the abiding fear that she’d miss her cat?

  “You should feel sorry for the lass,” Jeannie said, turning up the burner under the tea kettle. “She’s a lawyer, a spinster, a Yank, and her hobby is throwing pots. Such a blighted soul is surely in need of holidays. She’s probably scrimped for years to afford a few weeks in Scotland.”

  Liam Cromarty felt sorry for himself, which unmanly sentiment, Jeannie—a relatively new mother and one of Liam’s favorite cousins—would sniff out before the tea kettle had come to a boil.

  “Have Uncle Donald show your spinster around then,” Liam suggested, plucking an apple from the bowl of fruit on Jeannie’s counter. “He’s a hopeless flirt, he knows every back road and ruined castle in every shire, and he’ll raise her spirits with naughty jokes.”

  Jeannie took down two mugs, one a bright floral ceramic—Morag’s work—the other clear Scandinavian glass. When a baby joined a household, apparently every manifestation of order and organization was imperiled.

  “Liam, for shame,” Jeannie said, slouching onto a stool at the kitchen counter. “Donald would put the lady in waders and drag her to the nearest trout stream where she’d be pestered crazy by the midgies.”

  “Donald would also ply the poor dear with good whisky. Sounds like a fine time to me.”

  The baby on Jeannie’s shoulder began to fuss, so Liam plucked him from his mother’s grasp.

  “Hush, laddie. We’ll take you fishing soon enough.” The wee fellow peered at Liam from the blue, blue eyes common to Cromarty men of every age. “You must learn to be quiet though, for Donald takes a dim view of a boy who scares away the fishies.”

  “The little ones always behave for you,” Jeannie said, a touch of envy in her tone. “Every bairnie in the family takes to you, no matter how you grouse and brood. You need a holiday too, Liam.”

  Jeannie was the cousin closest to Liam in age, and more than that, she was his friend. When he’d nearly disappeared into the bottle after Karen’s death, Jeannie hadn’t given up on him, and for that Liam would always owe her.

  He loved her too, and was glad she’d found a man to share her life with.

  Truly, he was.

  “Can’t you ask Morag?” Liam said. “She’s the logical choice, being the family potter.”

  Liam rubbed wee Henry’s back, earning a milky-scented baby sigh near his ear. The feel of the child in his arms provoked sentiments ranging from despair to fury to something so tender and vast, he—a man who made his living with words—didn’t even try to find a label for it.

  “Morag has to build up inventory for this summer,” Jeannie said. “She’s at her wheel and kiln all the livelong day, and she’s not the cheeriest soul.”

  The kettle whistled, and Jeannie hopped off her stool while Liam continued to rub the boy’s back. Morag was a right terror on her bad days. Even when she danced, she brought a ferocity to her grace that Liam understood perhaps better than she’d guess.

  The ink was barely dry on Morag’s divorce decree. Now was not the time to impose.

  “When is this poor refugee from the American legal system to grace Caledonia’s shores?”

  Liam should not have asked. Jeannie’s smile said as much, for the question implied that Liam was rearranging his schedule, making yet another effort to accommodate the vast Cromarty family network. Every auntie, cousin, and in-law assumed a man without wife and children was on call to make up the numbers socially, pitch in on the weekend projects with the menfolk, and otherwise step and fetch on command.

  All because they couldn’t bear for him to be lonely, of course.

  Liam could have told them that activity and family gatherings didn’t cure loneliness—something the American spinster probably understood too.

  “What does it say about me,” he murmured to the child, “that I have something in common with elderly lady lawyers in need of a holiday?”

  A wet, unmistakable noise came from the vicinity of the baby’s nappy, while Jeannie poured the tea, and Liam made a mental vow to introduce the American spinster to Uncle Donald.

  The flight from Newark to Edinburgh had been made more bearable by an empty seat to Louise’s left, and a little old Scottish lady to her right. Hazel Chapman had once upon a time taken tea with the Queen at one of the Holyroodhouse Palace garden parties, which gatherings were limited to a select few hundred souls whom Her Royal Majesty wanted to honor for civic works.

  “I volunteer a lot,” Hazel had confided, “because I miss the grandchildren so, but a man must go where there’s work, aye?”

  Yes, and a woman must too, and that meant another semester teaching drawing, at least. Louise chatted with Hazel through passport control and customs, and as they approached the international arrivals area, endured several invitations to stop by Hazel’s wool goods shop in some unpronounceable town in the Highlands.

  Hazel referred to her boss as “the laird,” and said he lived all by himself in a castle on a loch. Truly, Louise had ended up in Scotland.

  They parked their suitcases side by side as Hazel rhapsodized about her whisky fudge recipe—an idea Louise could heartily endorse—but Louise couldn’t see anybody holding a sign for “L. Cameron” in the milling crowd.

  After making initial arrangements with Jeannie MacDonald, one of Dunstan Cromarty’s cousins, Louise had exchanged e-mails with another cousin, Liam Cromarty. She pictured her prospective driver as dour, reliable, and safe. The airport crowd included plenty of sturdy, tweedy-looking older fellows who—

  “I’ll fetch that for you,” said a tall, dark-haired guy in jeans, or at least that’s what Louise thought he’d said—to Hazel. The actual words were, “Ah’ll fetch ’at for ye,” with the intonations in all the wrong places.

  While Louise’s brain translated, Tall, Dark, and Scottish swiped not Hazel’s plain black suitcase, but Louise’s larger rainbow-print bag.

  “Hold on just a minute,” Louise snapped, “you’ve made a mistake, and that’s my bag.”

  “She’s right, dearie,” Hazel chimed in helpfully. “Mine’s the plain black.”

  Dark brows knit over a substantial nose. “According to your e-mail, your bag is all over colors,” he said—to Hazel—and he still didn’t turn loose of the suitcase.

  “My e-mail,” Louise informed him, “said my suitcase bears a pastel spectrum print, which it does. Are you Mr. Cromarty?”

  He was a big sort of Mr. Cromarty—Liam’s son, probably. Not his grandson, because this guy had crow’s-feet at the corners of startlingly blue eyes, and a few signs of wear around his mouth. Broad shoulders, long legs, dark hair in need of a trim.

  Not at all what Louise had pictured.

  “Aye, I’m Liam Cromarty.” He released the suitcase to extend a large hand in Louise’s direction. “Welcome to Scotland, Miss Cameron.”

  “She’s not the formal type,” Hazel supplied as Louise’s hand was enveloped in a warm grasp. “Americans aren’t, you know. You can call her Louise. I’m Hazel, by the way.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Hazel. Will you be traveling with Miss Cameron?”

  Louise had trouble understanding Liam Cromarty amid the bustle and noise of the airport, but she could pick up the hopeful note behind his words.

  “Gracious, laddie, no,” Hazel said. “Harold would have apoplexies if I left him home alone for one more night, and there’s my Harold now. Louise, you enjoy your stay. The Edinburgers are nice enough once you get to know them.”

  Hazel toddled off, halloo’ing at one of those short, sturdy older fellows Louise had planned on having for her driver. Mr. Cromarty seemed sad to see Hazel go—as was Louise.

  “Glaswegians are notoriously friendly,” he said, picking up Louise’s suitcase. “They can’t help it any more than they can help naming half their boys Jimmy. Did she natter your ear off for the entire flight?”

  The suitcase weighed a ton and had a perfectl
y functional set of wheels. Scottish guys wrestled telephone poles. Maybe they liked to haul suitcases around too.

  “Hazel nattered both of my ears off, showed me pictures of the house where she grew up in Glasgow, the town where she sells wool goods in the Highlands now, and at least four hundred pictures of the grandkiddies,” Louise said.

  Wee Harry, wee Robbie, and the baby, Agnes. Somewhere east of Iceland, Louise had even started comprehending what Hazel had said.

  “I’m a little tired, Mr. Cromarty. Would you mind slowing down?”

  “Flying west is easier,” he said, adjusting his stride and angling for the doors. “Coming this way you need a bit of time to find your bearings. Are you hungry?”

  He moved with the easy grace of a man who could see over the crowds. Louise was tall—almost five foot ten in bare feet—but Mr. Cromarty had nearly six inches on her.

  “I’m not that hungry,” Louise said. She was too tired to be hungry. “A bottle of water would hit the spot.”

  They emerged from the airport into a sunny morning, though Louise’s body had been expecting the middle of the night.

  “Good God, the light,” she whispered.

  Mr. Cromarty set down her suitcase. “I can lend you my sunglasses once we get to the car.”

  “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Maryland anymore,” Louise said, shading her eyes. The light poured from the sky, bright, sharp, brilliant in a way at once welcome and unfamiliar.

  Either Mr. Cromarty was used to oddball Americans, or he was patient by nature. Louise spun a full, slow circle, letting that light readjust her circadian rhythm, her mood, her spirit. This was light to wake up the body, mind, heart, and soul.

  “I might have to take up painting,” she said, assaying a smile at her unlikely companion. “Light like this reveals much.”